RECENT COMMENTS BY Craig Russell

Columns by Craig Russell

But pick and choose.
Robot or Man. Machine- or hand-made, You cannot have both. Greed, I keep reminding you, Is the failure to choose. The unwillingness to pick one thing over Another. Wealth or simplicity; you cannot have both.
~Diane Wakoski, 'Greed: Part 8'

The cheap, commercial luridness of October 31 here in the United States almost totally obscures an event of immense proportions, an event that quite literally changed the world ' an event that should never go unnoticed on its anniversary because it marked the beginning, both for better and for worse, of the individual consciousness.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best;
Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty. ~Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
I have spent most of my life institutionalized. For more than ' of my life ' 39 of my 50 years ' I have either studied or taught in a school or a college in upstate New York .

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. ~ Goethe
George Orwell warned us more than 50 years ago about the political consequences of lazy and sloppy thinking in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. Our language, he wrote, 'becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us...

The American Heritage Dictionary defines nonage (non-age) as 'the period during which one is legally underage' or 'a period of immaturity.' The great philosopher Immanuel Kant, however, offered a slightly different definition of that word in his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment? 'Enlightenment,' he said, 'is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage,' with nonage being 'the inability to use...

My birth, like yours, came about by accident. My mother just happened to be sitting in a soda shop one day when my father walked in and saw her. He was three years older than her; they went to different schools and lived ten miles apart. Some might call their meeting mere coincidence. Others, like Carl Jung perhaps, might call it synchronicity. Maybe if my father had run into a friend and...

A certain event this past week made me think about the amazing multitude of small, seemingly insignificant, ways in which the State manipulates us mentally to its enduring advantage.
The event: 'Herb Brooks,' who coached the American hockey team which improbably won the 1980 Olympic gold medal in Lake Placid , died Monday in an automobile accident. Seems simple and straightforward enough. Seems...

To live outside the law, you must be honest. ~ Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie
You never know where, when, why, or even if a bolt of enlightenment might strike you. You never know what you might be doing when, suddenly, you experience an epiphany, when a veil that you didn't even know you had on suddenly lifts and you can, for the first time, see.

Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar, dancing on the light from star to star . . . . ~ Neil Young, 'Like a Hurricane'
This Friday night I will be singing and playing bass with our band in yet another bar. In most ways, it will differ very little from any other gig we've ever played ' except, of course, for one thing:

When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, one of our greatest fears, the one that disturbed our waking hours and gave us nightmares, was of nuclear holocaust. We were told in school and on television that the Bomb could fall literally any second. We might have warning. There might be an alarm. But then again, there might not be. Our teachers told us if we saw that flash in the sky we...

Jim Bouton, who 40 years ago won 20 games for the New York Yankees, wrote in the New York Times last weekend about his recent visit to the American Museum of Folk Art where he saw an exhibition called 'The Perfect Game.' Reading his account made me think not only about the effect of mass produced art on the individual and its relationship to binding him to the State but also about how creating...

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. ~ Gandhi
Driving down the Parkway yesterday I saw what our greed, our pride, our arrogance, and our overwhelming self-centeredness has done to us and the world we live...

Sometimes you learn from books. Sometimes you learn from other people. Sometimes you learn directly, sometimes indirectly. Other times you learn just by watching, by noticing things, by asking yourself questions about them and trying as best you can to answer them . . . .
It was, as Vito Corleone might have said, an offer I couldn't refuse: free tickets to see Steve Winwood and the Dead at...

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph'but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. ~Thoreau, Walden
Why are you reading this?

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. ~ Benjamin Franklin
Baseball fans received a surprise the other day when Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs broke a bat during a game and the umpire saw that it had been corked. Earlier this year, Sosa hit his 500th homerun, thus ensuring, so many thought, a future spot in the Hall...

'The response to television may be fairly described as passive . . . . Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.' ~ Herbert Krugman (1969), quoted in Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television

I spent a little money at the bike shop last week to get my old bicycle in shape for the summer. In fact, I just got back from riding my bicycle to campus and back ' the first time I've done that in the twelve years I've worked there. It got me thinking because, when I was a student, I always biked to campus. After all, when I was a student, I didn't have either a car or a driver's license.

You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal. ~Leonard Cohen
In the spring of 1903, most people in upstate New York woke up in the cold. Their stoves were downstairs in the kitchen, and not much heat made it upstairs into the bedrooms.

Modern English . . . is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration. ~ George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Nine people who wish to become the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States recently 'debated' in South Carolina . The election, of course, is not for another year and a half, but the political drumbeat has already started ' a quiet, faint rumble in the background that will only grow in intensity over the next 18 months. Those in the employ of the Great American...

Chances are you have one of the most insidiously dangerous objects ever created--and one of the State's most powerful tools of domination--in your living room right now. You may very well have one in your bedroom, too, and in your basement.
It's insidious because most Americans don't think of them as dangerous, nor do they think of them as tools of State domination; otherwise they...

'We got department stores and toilet paper . . . got fuel to burn, got roads to drive. Keep on rocking in the free world . . . .' ~ Neil Young
It's easy for those of us who oppose the Government's immoral slaughtering of Iraqis to blame George W. Bush & Co. But perhaps this war is not as 'cut and dried' as we might want it to be. Each of us has to ask himself if he doesn't bear some...

'You could have arrested me jogging as I jogged up and down the road. You could have arrested me at Wal-Mart . . . this ain't America anymore when the ATF has that kind of power to come into anybody's home and kick doors down.' ~ David Koresh (1959-1993)